The European Union is preparing a potential antitrust investigation into Microsoft Teams – Computer – News

As long as you still need an Office account to use it, I don’t see a problem.

This research specifically relates to the 2016-2020 startup period during which Microsoft gave Teams functionality for free in addition to existing commercial Office licenses.

This can be a form of market abuse and quite frankly: I don’t think this is weird at all. Microsoft has its dominance in the word processing market in no time at all here; Table; Presentation software and MS Teams linking to this existing product suite as a hacker towards another market and from this bridge then positioning this new product deeply and well below cost, using their generous reserves and profits from other segments. After all, you can’t go for much less cost than “free” which is the best price you could possibly wish for.

I regularly hear cases where, for example, a Slack subscription was running where all layers of work in the organization were already satisfied, and then all of a sudden the management decided to stop this and force the use of MS Teams “because that’s what we get for free with our Office subscription”.

Then Covid came. And MS has made Teams “mercy” completely open to everyone – subject to certain restrictions and fair use, I think, so as not to overload the platform too much on its existing business clients. But this was a nice influx of additional users to “catch” the system, of course.

Pushing it now also with deep integration with Windows 11 is just the next step after previous anti-trust behavior by regulators was not blamed. They’re totally back in this regard, and ‘as usual’ are exploring what they can get away with.

[Reactie gewijzigd door R4gnax op 10 oktober 2021 16:54]